As I finished writing my first novel, Songs of No Provenance, I experienced the terrible understanding that the ending I had written would not provoke a strong emotion in the reader. I knew I could do it, because I’d managed to access strong emotion sometimes, at the conclusion of short stories and novels I’d thrown away or continued to wrestle with. Sometimes I’ve known when I’ve succeeded and sometimes I haven’t until receiving reader responses. The first story in my collection Rainbow Rainbow, “Laramie Time,” has made me cry a few times after long periods away. I don’t know if it causes that reaction in anyone else, but I got myself to cry, at least, perhaps partly because the story deals with regret and emotion around the idea of parenthood that still feels unresolved in me. I know it’s cringey to admit this but I will for the purpose of understanding it.
Unlike other emotions I hope to provoke in my readers, making someone cry is not an outcome I’ve ever felt I had control over. And control is something I want when I write, at least as I close in on a final draft. I want to write wildly and freely when I’m discovering what a piece is, and then gain what control I can over the material through revision. I still am haunted by a workshop I had at the Stegner Fellowship years ago, where my cohort was debating two different possible reads of a story I’d submitted. Someone floated the idea that maybe the vastly differing responses were okay, and the workshop leader said, “But, as the writer, don’t you want to be in control?”
Laughter and tears are the two most visceral experiences an author can hope to provoke in a reader.
I figured there must be techniques I could employ to push the reader toward tears, as long as the emotional and character pieces were already in place. Surely there was craft to that goal mixed in with the magic of whatever was already in the narrative and whatever the reader brought to it. When I’m struggling with a problem of craft, I usually try to teach a class on the topic. This impulse comes back to a mantra from one of my early teaching mentors, Margo Figgins, who warned me to never ask a question in class to which I already knew the answer. The students would sense I had an answer in mind, and class would be boring and tyrannical. I love teaching because I learn so much from my students, and I anticipated that discussing this subject with them would help me break through. So I invented a class called “Writing Emotional Stakes: How to Make the Reader Cry.”
Throughout the course, we read and analyzed books and stories that I felt were either generally successful in making readers cry or which failed in interesting and instructive ways. I taught the class again later through the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Tin House. Over the course of teaching and discussing the works with the students, we identified several techniques you could employ if you are having the same problem I was: failing to push the reader along to a final crest of emotion. Here they are.
One of the only craft lessons about making the reader cry that I came into this study already knowing was that, if a character feels sorry for themself, the reader usually doesn’t feel the need to do that work for them. If a character is crying or thinking self-pitying thoughts, most likely the reader will not build a natural sympathy toward that character. The character is already doing the job for the reader. I think of a child, observed on the street, dropping a precious toy and breaking it. This is plainly not a happy moment, but it’s the child’s reaction that makes it crushing or not. If they start crying, the moment could be annoying or quotidian, but it can turn heartbreaking if the child scrapes up the toy fragments, takes a brave breath, and walks on. If they slip the broken toy into their pocket without showing their parent, even sadder.
There is a throwaway moment in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad where a man has spent hours staring into the sun during an episode of grief as a child. Egan writes, “Now there are permanent gray smudges in Scotty’s vision. He says he likes them—actually, what he says is: ‘I consider them a visual enhancement.’ We think they remind him of his mom.” Scotty never feels sorry for his loss or permanent injury. His upbeat outlook makes the reader feel so much more pain for his situation.
In one of the most masterful graphic short stories of all time, “Killing and Dying,” Adrian Tomine tells the story of a family of three where, through the course of the story, the mother dies of cancer. Her illness and death are made devastating by the fact that her situation is too painful to even be spoken of—we have to glean the entire narrative of her decline from her head scarf and cane, and her eventual permanent disappearance from the dinner table. There is only one moment in the story where her illness is verbally acknowledged. We understand how grim the emotional situation has grown for the father and daughter after her death through little signs. For one dinner for the two of them, the father has to wash dishes before they eat takeout pizza, implying that so many dishes are dirty that he needs to wash two clean plates for their meal. The daughter is an aspiring standup comic, and toward the end of the story, the father secretly observes her bombing horrifically at a local café. When she comes home later, he asked how the set went, knowing full well it was awful. She says, “Pretty good, actually,” with a hopeful smile. And that moment is so much more gut wrenching than if she’d cried and told him the truth. All that is unspoken between them, the way she’s learning to protect her father from hard things, it brings home all they’ve both been through in a perfectly brutal way.
In the opening of Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age, when the Black protagonist is stopped by a racist security guard while babysitting her white charge, Reid describes Emira’s gestures that telegraph suppressed anxiety: “Emira swallowed and heard herself say,” “Emira touched her hair,” “Emira found herself arranging her mouth as if she’d ingested something too hot.” These understated gestures for such a dire situation make Emira’s experience of profiling even more visceral.
At a conference this past year, a writer who took one of my workshops on this subject approached me at a party and cheerfully told me she disagreed with the above take. She said that when a character cries on the page she does feel a lot for them. Her experience speaks to how subjective this element of craft is, and how much of the readers’ reactions will permanently remain outside the writer’s control. I agree with her that there are exceptions to this rule of thumb, as there are to any rule. In “Lupinski,” one of the only stories Myron Taube ever wrote (introduced to me by my talented MFA student Nathan Blum), there is a moment where the character cries that makes me cry, too, one of the only moments in fiction where I can remember having such a reaction to a character crying. Part of how Taube pulls this off is the deep embodiment of the moment. He writes, “I can’t stop the tears from running down my neck and soaking the yellow raincoat.” While this line may not seem like much out of context, it hits hard in the story. Partly because the feeling of tears running down into a collar and soaking a jacket is such a particular and uncomfortable sensory experience that I feel it on my own body every time I read the line. And partly because the sad basic quotidian nature of the yellow raincoat returns me to the vulnerability of the human body and its unending need for basic care even when everything around you has gone to hell.
I find surprise to be one of the most consistent features of every passage in literature that makes me cry. In real life, breakups or death or other griefs always feel shocking to me, even if they follow the slow dissolution of a bond or a long illness. We don’t naturally have the same level of emotional investment in characters on the page as we do with people in our lives, so sorrow in fiction has to be structurally surprising in order to achieve the automatic surprise of real-life sorrow.
At the beginning of “Lupinski,” an older man named Epstein is going to visit his sick wife in the ICU. When he arrives, the doctor pulls him aside and tells him she is going to die. He hasn’t expected this news, and neither has the reader, so the words hit us both at once. Always, I cry. Then it becomes clear that the doctor has two patients confused. At the sudden and unexpected relief, I cry again. The twin moments of surprise, hitting one after the other, startle the reader into emotion.
Other books use misdirection to embed this element of surprise. I will have some spoilers in the next paragraph, and a few later in the essay, so turn back now if you don’t want them. But in Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls, the first book that ever made me weep unconsolably, a boy has two beloved hunting dogs. The male dog is injured on a hunt and a laborious series of scenes follow where the boy tries to save the animal. As a reader, you are so focused on the male dog’s recovery that then when the female dog dies, so rapidly and apparently for no reason, the sorrow hits you a million times harder, coming as it does out of nowhere. In A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara focuses the reader’s worry on the protagonist, Jude, so intensely that when another beloved character dies in a car accident out of nowhere, I was so shocked with grief that I screamed and threw the book across my kitchen as though it was my own friend who had been killed. I wept and swore off the book (but finished it anyway). In The School for Good Mothers, the brilliant first novel by Jessamine Chan, Chan gives us a crucial time jump right at the end of the novel, in a moment when we are awaiting the judgement of whether a mother and daughter will be separated. The novel up until that point has moved along in a predictable rhythm of time that the reader has grown used to. But just in the most dramatic moment, when a social worker is about to pass judgement on the fate of a family, Chan changes the rhythm of time by skipping over crucial scenes leading up to the bureaucratic decision, catapulting us abruptly into the scene where the judgement has already been passed. I cried at the surprise of the move, which intensified the horror and injustice of the moment.
Humor also often works with the structure of surprise, and laughter and tears are the two most visceral experiences an author can hope to provoke in a reader. Adding humor to a sad scene can intensify the emotions around a moment that is intended to be sorrowful. In “Lupinski,” the way we understand the doctor has mixed up his patients is that he tells Epstein that his wife has requested last rites. Epstein, who is Jewish, says, “My wife wants a priest, like a Catholic?” The moment is hilarious—more so because the reader has been left vulnerable by the foretelling of death just before—and the humor disarms the reader, leaving them vulnerable to the further brutality to come.
Lorrie Moore’s story, “Dance in America,” one of my favorite short stories of all time, follows a visiting dancer as she reunites with an old friend whose child has received a death sentence for cystic fibrosis. The story is full of moments of humor and sorrow pushed up together, but at the end there is a moment that makes me cry every time. The dancer asks the child which planet in the solar system he likes best, and he says, “Earth, of course.” The moment is funny because it’s the most boring answer, not what you’d expect from an imaginative little boy, but it’s also crushing, because we know that the child will not for long get to experience the planet that the adults around him take for granted.
Strong emotion can also be achieved within the context of injustice. In Where the Red Fern Grows, it doesn’t feel fair that the female dog has died. We expected the male dog to die because he had terrible injuries justly sustained during a hunt. The female dog should have been fine. She was healthy. I remember, as a child, late at night in bed, rereading the end over and over wishing it could be different.
In The School for Good Mothers, the judgement to separate Frida from her child feels deeply unfair both because of the structural racist, classist, and misogynist systems that have caused the child to be removed from Frida’s care, but also because of the time leap past the moment where the social worker makes and delivers the devastating decision. Chan opens Chapter 18 with a whole page of sensory details about the social worker’s office, and it’s not until the bottom of the page, after we’ve sat with Frida absorbing the room for a while, that the reader discovers that Frida has already been separated from her child. The reader experiences some of the unfairness of Frida’s situation by being left completely out of the decision and even the process of its delivery, just the way Frida felt powerless, throughout the book, against the systemic forces destroying her life. As a reader, you wish you could rewind back to before the start of Chapter 18, to the scenes of judgement and delivery that Chan left out, and that you might somehow find a different result. Since the reader hasn’t seen the delivery of the news, it almost feels possible that it might not be true.
Open Throat, the brilliant novel by Henry Hoke about a queer mountain lion, uses the larger injustice of climate change to heighten the sorrow of the animal’s particular story. Along the lines of Part I of this essay, the mountain lion never feels sorrow for themself for not having food or water, for the fires and highways and destruction to their environment caused by humanity. We come to understand the mountain lion’s desire and suffering through embodiment, lines like “my mouth waters and the drool slides down and soaks my paws” and “I need more than a dirty sip.” The book makes the reader constantly aware, in the most personal and urgent terms, of how we have destroyed the earth for this creature, and the book brought home the climate crisis to me more powerfully than any other book I’ve read because of the intense personal experience of the animal. The end of the book features a different kind of injustice—the wrongful death of a hero—which amps up the sadness by adding to the mix another wrenching emotion: outrage.
One final craft element that always conjures tears for me: when an author makes me care about a certain possibility and then takes that possibility away. One example of this is from Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, the story of an unhappy family in suburban Connecticut. Together, over the course of the novel, the couple painfully arrives at the same dream: to move to Paris for a more a thrilling life. The reader comes to invest deeply in this plan, which appears to be the solution to all the couple’s problems. Then, through the surprise introduction of an unplanned pregnancy, the plan becomes impossible, crushing the reader.
The same mechanism is at work in The School for Good Mothers, where what we want more than anything is the reunion of Frida and her daughter, Harriet. The easy part as a writer is taking away; the harder part is making the reader care before that eventuality. Chan wins the reader’s investment through the emotional intensity of the rare moments where Frida and Harriet are together. Moments that often brought me to tears, like this one, a tentative reunion under a social worker’s supervision: “Harriet smiles, exposing her few chicklet teeth. She pats Frida’s cardigan with her sticky hands.” These shy broaches of affection are restrained and heartbreaking, and as a reader you can’t help wanting more.
Of course, there are many factors that lead a reader to have an emotional response to a book. A few of my students said they had never cried before while reading—though some were broken down at last by Where the Red Fern Grows. I cry an awful lot. I also am aware that having been raised in New England, land of emotional repression, probably leads me to be more moved by moments of emotional restraint than other readers might experience. So the above techniques are simply craft elements that I’ve observed worked for me and many of the students I’ve taught.
When I returned to work on Songs of No Provenance, I had a better idea of how to provoke a response of sorrow in the reader. The scene where I wanted to elicit this response was the last scene of the book that my protagonist, Joan Vole, spends with her mentee and best friend, a successful indie singer/songwriter named Paige. The scene is filled with their complicated history—full of romance and mentorship, and jealousy. Joan has caused deep harm to Paige, and vice versa. I wanted the reader to feel something, even if they don’t cry. I employed some of the craft techniques above, and I hope I got there. But that’s for you and your tear ducts to decide.
